Norbert Vicari

A model based development approach for building automation systems

As of today, building automation systems are present in almost any commercial building. They perform climate control, lightning control, access control, surveillance, and quite a few other tasks. As a result of their evolutionary development, building automation systems are divided into separate silos of disciplines that are not well integrated with each other. As of today, a variety of communication protocols, data models and engineering approaches are used by different vendors. Existing standardized building automation protocols as BACnet or KNX allow integration of some disciplines on the communication level but fail to provide means for common description of devices, services and data on the semantic level. This means that building automation applications that span multiple disciplines require a high effort for development, engineering and maintenance. If devices from multiple vendors are integrated in one installation, a set of different engineering tools and vendor-specific knowledge is required. In the ITEA “Building as a Service” (BaaS) project we try to overcome these deficiencies and define a common way to develop, engineer, commission, operate and maintain building automation systems following a service oriented approach. The whole process will be supported by semantic models to reduce costs and time-to-market, which is a quite new approach. In this paper we will present the current state of the work with special regard to domain modeling and model driven processes that are currently being specified for the BaaS platform.

Towards a Service Oriented Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks in Industrial Applications

Abstract We discuss the introduction of service oriented architectures to wireless sensor networks (WSN) in industrial applications. We give an example for a WSN architecture as applied in the EU project SOCRADES in order to explain constraints preventing a full-fledged service oriented approach. Such an approach appears to be beneficial for applications like diagnostics or monitoring where service composition can provide new functionalities. However, the limited resources in WSN must be taken into account. For control applications additional constraints like determinism or latency bound severly limit a loose coupling of services. As a consequence we propose a support by appropriate design and engineering tools.

A cross-layer approach for enabling low duty cycled ZigBee mesh sensor networks

In this paper large scale multihop sensor networks are established as non-beacon enabled ZigBee mesh networks. The lifetime of the network is increased by putting nodes to sleep and to wakeup state autonomously. To enable a reliable system with sensor nodes sleeping in an asynchronous manner, we propose a cross-layer sleep scheduling solution coupled with ZigBeepsilas proposed AODV routing. It consists of two parts: a) neighbor aware communication (NAC) and b) adaptive resynchronization (AR). NAC avoids sending packets to sleeping nodes while AR allows the sensor nodes to adapt their sleeping schedule to their neighborspsila duty cycles. ns-2-simulations show that the performance of such a cross-layer optimized system in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio is comparable to the benchmark case of synchronized sleep schedules.

Engineering and operation made easy - a semantics and service oriented approach to building automation

Building automation systems control many aspects of todays buildings - lightning control, air condition, shading, access control, and surveillance, just to name a few. This diversity and the diversity of related technologies and protocols entails that the extension or integration of building automation systems requires a major effort. To address these challenges, the ITEA3 Building as a Service (BaaS) project developed a reference architecture that is based on a service oriented approach enhanced with semantic descriptions that aims at model based code generation and simple integration of legacy devices. In this paper, we present an overview of the BaaS reference architecture with a specific focus on the information model and on the envisioned way to take advantage of the semantic descriptions for information filtering, search and discovery throughout the lifecycle of a building automation system.